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Father of poisoned baby rallies parents in tainted-milk fight

DAXING, China–Zhao Lianhai's tiny apartment, tucked away in a middle-class neighbourhood south of Beijing, doesn't look like the command centre of an influential lobby group.

It looks like any apartment, anywhere in the world, inhabited by a 3-year-old boy: awash in building blocks, toy trains, fire engines and a complete set of figures from the Disney movie Kung Fu Panda.

But it is from these cramped quarters that Zhao, a 37-year-old father, used a computer and his deep personal resolve to build a website and a following to fight a plan to pay off parents whose children were poisoned by tainted milk.

The Chinese government had hoped the compensation plan – introduced Dec. 27 and funded by 22 dairy companies – would finally lay to rest the explosive poisoned milk scandal that rocked the country last year. The scandal wiped out dairy exports, triggered billions of dollars in losses and shattered international confidence.

But laying it all to rest now seems unlikely. This week, more than 370 aggrieved parents signed a letter posted by Zhao rejecting the plan.

And yesterday, a team of 10 lawyers representing the parents of 240 poison victims, filed a class-action lawsuit in the Supreme People's Court of China against the same 22 companies offering the compensation.

The lawsuit is in addition to one filed earlier against dairy producer Sanlu, now bankrupt. The signatories and the lawsuit constitute a double blow for a government keen to put the scandal behind it.

The scandal erupted last fall when babies were discovered to have developed kidney stones – some lethal – after drinking milk formula tainted with melamine, a chemical compound used to make plastics and fertilizers. Dairy producers added it to the milk to falsely boost protein readings and ensure sales.

Chinese babies paid the price.

The government's own official numbers are explosive: nearly 300,000 suffered kidney stones and other ailments, 53,000 were hospitalized and six died of kidney failure. Also according to government figures, more than 300 babies remain in hospital.

When the scandal broke, Zhao built an immediate following among parents with a website called the Home for Kidney Stone Babies. His reasons for resisting the compensation plan today are plain: the parents weren't consulted, the compensation is too small, and – most importantly – little or nothing is known about the long-term effects of melamine poisoning.

He fears that by signing on to the government-backed plan, parents will sign away their rights to seek future medical care should their children suffer long-term, debilitating effects.

But Zhao's website also raises another uncomfortable question – one that many have thought, but few have expressed.

"How many kidney-stone babies are there?" the website asks. "You can do the calculation yourself."

Zhao's research, using publicly available reports from official sources, shows there were between 60 million and 70 million children under age 3 in China in 2007.

According to his data, there were 22 million examinations for kidney stones – some, he contends, probably patients who had two exams or more. That means, he says, there are probably "50 million babies who have not yet been checked."

How many could have kidney stones?

"The potential figure makes me feel numb," he says. No one can say with precision how many Chinese babies have kidney stones today, he concedes, but it's "definitely" higher than official figures.

"We need more research," says Zhao. "And the truth is we don't know anything about the long-term effects children might face."

As he speaks, his 3-year-old son Pengrui plays noisily in the next room in a world full of toys.

Last fall an ultrasound showed little Pengrui carried a kidney stone too. Although more recent tests show the stone has now gone, Zhao says his son still suffers from abdominal pains and cannot urinate as freely as before.

"Look at this," says Zhao worryingly, motioning to his computer.

There on the screen is a photograph of the internal organs of an animal that died last year from eating melamine-laced pet food. The organs are eroded – eaten away.

"This is what we're afraid of," he says, touching the image with his index finger and staring into the screen. "We fear the same thing could happen to a human kidney.

"And the food fed to this animal had less melamine than the milk had."

Under the government-backed compensation plan, $164 million would be paid in one-time cash payments, with an additional $36 million to fund future medical needs.

But the plan stipulates payments would stop once a victim turned 18.

Under the cash payouts portion, parents whose children died would be offered about $36,000; those whose children suffered serious injuries would be paid up to $5,300 and those who suffered minor injuries, would receive about $360.

But it wasn't just concerned parents who were reading Zhao's website. So were Chinese authorities.

Zhao has faced sustained harassment since he mounted the site.

He has been visited and threatened by police; students who've offered to help with the site have been similarly intimidated; meetings he has tried to hold have been broken up by authorities; police have visited his wife, Li Xuemei, as well as his mother, sister and brother, asking them to persuade him to drop his campaign; and finally, this month, he and others were detained for six hours to try to prevent them from holding a press conference.

On occasion, his website has included some cutting-edge citizen reporting, including a posting of an official leaked document dated Oct. 7, 2008 from the Department of Public Health in populous Henan province, notifying all provincial hospitals that kidney stones of less than four millimetres were not to be recorded or reported.

Further, field reports indicate that parents whose children have recently died have been denied autopsies aimed at determining whether melamine was involved.

But Zhao and his supporters are not backing off. "We're seriously considering appealing by letter to the World Health Organization if we cannot get information about the long-term effects of melamine poisoning," he says.

Zhao isn't the only one pressing forward.

In a sixth-floor office of Beijing's Haidian district, legal scholar Xu Zhiyong is at the centre of a team of 20, including 10 lawyers, who are moving ahead on the class-action front. More than 240 families – including some who have lost children – have signed formal papers of trusteeship, empowering the team to act on their behalf.

A class action is the best way forward, explains Xu, otherwise, "some families wouldn't be able to afford legal action at all."

And there are precedents for class-action suits in Chinese courts, he says, although he concedes they are "very rare."

China is still struggling to become a country that follows the rule of law, and judges were reminded by President Hu Jintao only a year ago that their first allegiance is to the Communist party, then to the people and thereafter, the constitution and the law.

Nevertheless, Xu and his team are undaunted. They prefer that the court listen to their clients' case and arrive at a legal decision – rather than accept an arbitrary and insufficient compensation package set by the government.

"It's not enough," says Xu. "Our hope is to have this dealt with through legal channels."

New York University Chinese law expert Jerome Cohen, who is also an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, calls the lawsuits "very significant," warning that a failure to deal with the parents' grievances could have "serious political consequences" both for the Chinese government and the Communist party.

The current compensation plan won't do, he says.

"What China needs to do is either open the courts or provide an adequate alternative remedy."

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